Photoshop Tutorial - How to Create a Satellite Dish
About this Tutorial
This tutorial is designed to show you an easy way to create your own satellite dish. While this satellite dish won't give you the same programming options you're used to, it will still make a welcome addition to any communications related portion of your web site. This tutorial could have made use of the pen tool but I decided to go with the more familiar polygonal lasso to ease any learning curve.
Step 1 - Build the Satellite Dish
Our first step is to draw the circular portion of the satellite dish. Begin by creating a new document at 500 x 500 pixels with a white background. Create a new layer and name it dish. Select a light to medium shade of gray and in the top half of the image create a circle using the elliptical marquee tool by holding shift and dragging, you want to make it take up just over half of the image, make sure you have "fill pixels" selected. Now we all know that a front on view of a satellite dish would be pretty boring. Lets add some perspective. With the dish layer selected go to Edit -> Transform -> Scale, change the width to about 75%. We also want to tilt the satellite dish up a bit, so go to Edit -> Transform -> Rotate, only about 10 degrees counter clockwise is needed. It's time to shade the satellite dish. Click on the "lock transparent pixels" icon on the layers palette. Choose the circular gradient tool and pick a gradient that goes from white to medium gray, drag out from the upper right 1/3 rd to the left. You should now have the rather boring image to the right.
Step 2 - Build the Satellite Dish Base & Arm
Create a new layer underneath the dish layer. Grab the polygonal lasso tool and draw the bottom bar that holds the satellite dish up, now go to Selection -> Modify -> Smooth, use a radius of 10. Now pick a very dark shade of gray and medium gray and fill it in with a linear gradient going from right to left on the vertical part of the pole. Create a new layer with the selection still on and draw another gradient for the diagonal part of the bar. Add a layer mask to the top bar and blend the gradients together so it looks natural. You can now merge these 2 layers together. Create another layer below the dish layer, we will use this for the satellite dish arm brackets. Get out the rectangle tool and draw one of the bottom brackets using dark gray, rotate it about 5 degrees to the left, you can shade it just like we did with the base pole. Copy the bracket, move it right and up a bit, then merge the bracket layer. Make a new layer called arm 1 above the satellite dish layer and use the polygonal lasso tool to create the lower arm before the bend. Refer to figure 2a on the right for an example of the shape. Continue working on a new layer (arm 2), this will be the section pointing upwards, use the same technique from arm 1 to create this shape (see figure 2b). Create a new layer called detector base at the very top and use the ellipse tool to create a circle at about the size of the one in figure 2c. Duplicate that layer and fill the circle with white, move the white circle layer below the detector base layer. On a new layer, lets call it arm 3 create a rectangle using the rounded rectangle tool set to 40 pixels and rotate it so it matches figure 2c.
Step 3 - Shading the Satellite Dish Arm and Beveling the Dish.
First select the arm 1 layer, lock transparent pixels and use the linear gradient tool with medium to dark gray to give it a nice base shade. With transparent pixels still locked, start painting in the shadow areas with a darker gray using a low flow brush until it looks right. Do the same thing each of the sections until it looks right. Now you want to blend the pieces together so add a layer mask to arm 3 and paint out the areas where arm 2 would be in front of it. Do the same thing to blend arm 2 & 1. You should now have something that looks like figure 3a. Now its starting to look a little better. It's time to bevel the satellite dish. Select the dish layer run add a bevel & emboss style, change the angle to 30 degrees and size to 20 pixels. It's time to add a little texture to the satellite dish. Add a pattern overlay layer style to the dish layer, select stone from the artist surfaces category and set opacity to 25% since we only want a hint of texture. We're almost there! If you've followed the tutorial closely your image should closely match the figure on the right.
Step 4 - Design Your Own Satellite Logo!
Now that we've gone through all this work it wouldn't be complete without your logo now would it? We are going to keep the example simple using my favorite logo of all time, mine of course! If you have a pre made logo just simply size it down to about 200 pixels wide, set mode to grayscale, copy it, then paste it into a new document. Set the canvas size to match the dimensions of your dish, in this case 290 x 340 pixels. We want to add a slight curve to the logo so it looks natural sitting on the dish so move the logo to the approximate position it will be on the dish and run Filter -> Distort -> Spherize with a setting of -40. Now copy your logo and paste it above the dish layer and position it at about the center top of the dish and lower the opacity to about 70% to allow the shading and texture back in. Finally for an added touch we will add the 4 screws that attach the satellite dish to the base. On a new layer use the circle tool to create a small circle at about 10 pixels wide. Add a bevel and emboss style set at about side 3 and pillow emboss and then adjust the fill slider to 0. Copy that layer 3 times and arrange them in the positions shown in the final image. It's time to add some color so add a hue/saturation layer above the others and set hue to 200 and saturation to 20 with colorize checked. Finally create the shadow by selecting all the pixels outside of the dish using the magic wand and inverting the selection. On a new layer under the others fill the selection with black. Choose Edit -> Transform -> Distort and drag the shadow around until it looks natural, then add gaussian blur of 5 pixels and lower the opacity to 50%. The final image on the right shows our satellite dish showcased on a nice background. Hope this tutorial gave you some ideas for your own projects. See ya next time!